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1 5 8 Chapter Five It pays best to bring people north to the United States; it pays best to send things south to Latin America. John M. Clark to the Policy Committee on Cultural Relations Activities, December 11, 1941 Overlapping and competing interests between the State Department’s Division of Cultural Relations and the CIAA’s Division of Cultural Relations (1940–1943), which was charged with activities in music, art, literary publications , and scholarships, resulted in an April 22, 1941, presidential order that Rockefeller submit all CIAA Division projects for State Department approval through a special committee. Its membership included representatives from the CIAA and the State Department as well as from the American Council of Learned Societies, which frequently worked with the CIAA (Rowland, 91). By 1942 some CIAA cultural relations activities were reassigned to its Science and Education Division; others came under the supervision of the CIAA’s newly created U.S. Inter-American Activities Division or were picked up by its Press and Publication Division. In September 1943 a Department of Special Services was created to combine the Cultural Relations and Inter-American Activities Divisions (Federal Records, 242–243).1 Special Services became an umbrella unit for three other divisions: Services and Field Coordination, Labor Relations, and Education and Teacher Aids. Most of the projects undertaken by these divisions can be characterized as working toward long-range influence in promoting hemispheric understanding and cooperation (Rowland, 92). For the purposes of simplifying the bureaucratic maze of reorganization and renaming of units, my discussion will emIN MUSEUMS, IN LIBRARIES, AND ON THE HOME FRONT The Divisions of Cultural Relations and Inter-American Affairs in the United States I N m U S e U m S , l I b R A R I e S , A N D o N T h e h o m e f R o N T 1 5 9 ploy the early divisional descriptors—Cultural Relations and Inter-American Activities in the United States—and will be organized chiefly in terms of subject headings that cut across the various offices.2 The Arts OnNovember7,1940,justmonthsaftertheCIAA’sinception,RobertG.Caldwell and Wallace K. Harrison, chairman and director, respectively, of the Cultural Relations Division, received written approval for twenty-six special projects at a cost of nearly one-half million dollars.3 The most expensive, at $150,000, was an inter-American exhibit of art and culture under the direction of MoMA, to be held simultaneously with parallel exhibits in capital cities throughout the Americas.4 Two hundred fifty-five U.S. paintings were curated by MoMA in conjunction with other major museums, and in April 1941 these were previewed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.5 Portions of the large exhibit then toured eight South American republics, Mexico, and Cuba for close to a year, beginning with an exposition at Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes in June. The emphasis was on modern art and included paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Loren MacIver, Eugene Speicher, Peter Hurd, and Robert Henri, among others. A file in the MoMA archive has valuations of all the paintings at the time, the highest being George Bellows’s Dempsey and Firpo and Georgia O’Keeffe’s The White Flower at $25,000 each. Edward Hopper’s watercolor Box Factory, Gloucester was valued at $400 and Arthur Dove’s Electric Peach Orchard at $250.6 U.S. specialists accompanied the various tours: MoMA’s Stanton Caitlin went to Mexico City, Quito, Lima, and Santiago; New Orleans artist Caroline Durieux, who had lived in Mexico and worked with Rivera and other muralists there, oversaw exhibits in Buenos Aires, Rio, and Montevideo; and Lewis A. Riley, who had studied art and archaeology and lived in Central America for nearly a decade, traveled to Havana, Caracas, and Bogotá. The ambitious project was successful in introducing a little-known aspect of U.S. culture to the other American republics. Durieux was enthusiastic about the South American reception, stating in a newspaper interview that more than sixty thousand people attended the three capital city exhibits. In Good Neighbor fashion, she emphasized fundamental similarities among the Americas that should outweigh any differences, but she seemed to put emphasis on race: “There is a definite kinship between North and South Americans who, after all, have sprung from the same European stock, and there is no reason why misunderstandings should exist between them.” She was particularly...

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